Rob goes to Home Depot to buy replacement windows. The service company that Home Depot contracts with shows up with a different name on the truck and does a great job. Rob thinks of this window company as just an extension of Home Depot and is happy Home Depot did a great job. Likewise, should the installation go south, it’s Home Depot that Rob calls and delivers a tongue lashing. Home Depot and Lowe’s are the go-to sources in home repair, improvement, or remodeling. Once you’re in the relationship, once you’re satisfied with a couple of jobs they do, you stay there. There’s no reason to change.

How does this translate to Zillow (or the other portals) vis-à-vis Coldwell Banker or RE/MAX. Zillow launched their television ad campaign intending to capture consumer mind share where none currently exists – a huge amount of “brand whitespace” in the real estate category, meaning no one brand symbolizes real estate in the U.S. This “white space” is the empty place(s) in the entire home ownership process to which the homeowner can’t manage to attach a name – any name, be it an agent name, a brokerage name, a realty website, or a trademark brand of any kind.

If the first brand that pops into a consumer’s head when they think about buying a house is Zillow and not a brokerage or franchise, that fundamentally changes the business equation, WITHOUT Zillow actually getting into the brokerage business.

There was a lengthy discussion about the similarities between the Zillow ads (first one and second one) and a flight of Coldwell Banker spots that aired earlier this year (right down to the music beds – did the Lumineers sample a little too much Phillip Phillips?). Both had a similar feel, warm and tender, family oriented, designed to bring a little moisture to the corner of your eye which we men brush away as a sudden onset of hay fever. (“No, really, it’s just the pollen.”)

But despite the small difference in the commercials’ approaches, and the similarities in the message (start your home search on our web site), there’s a huge difference in the brand experience being advertised. When the consumer goes to Zillow.com, they get the same experience every time. The website behaves the same whether you’re signing on from Connecticut or California. That’s what a brand promises – the fries will be the same no matter which McDonalds you drive through.

But Coldwell Banker is selling neither a website experience nor French fries. Yes, the chain of events may well begin with a web search (many web searches on many websites if the consumer research is valid) but the product being sold is agency representation in the home purchase/sale process. And THAT experience is not only different from branch to branch, but it is entirely different from agent to agent within the same branch. There is no possible brand continuity within a brokerage or franchise unless the broker trains her agents to a robotic repetitious adherence to company process and mantra. Perhaps some of the new models where agents are employees might be able to demand this level of adherence, but in an office of type-A personalities called independent contractors – NO WAY!

The discussion progressed on to the various models of brokerage, particularly considering the new LLC model where broker takes an equity position, not a commission split, in the agent’s business, not just within the current firm but in any future brokerage the agent affiliates with. (More on that concept in this article by Imprev CEO Renwick Congdon.) Carried to its logical extreme, this fractures the concept of broker branding beyond what all the king’s men could hope to reconstruct from Humpty Dumpty’s eggshells. This idea is worthy of another chapter all by itself, particularly the discussion of how a broker chooses which agents to “invest in.”

And to that point, how does the broker decide not only which agents she feels will be worthy of her investment, will be productive and return handsomely on her investment, but which of these agent-LLC’s will be brand reinforcing. Can a company, made up of a bunch of smaller mini-companies, actually have a brand identity and create brand awareness in the mind of the consumer? Or are they doomed to be lost in the aforementioned snow storm of white space?

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